I’ve been trying to understand how media applications incorporate VLC player functionality. I heard that Miro integrates VLC components, but when I look through the Miro codebase, I don’t see any direct references or imports related to VLC.
What I’m looking for:
How does Miro integrate VLC functionality?
Are there specific libraries or bindings in use?
Could the integration occur through an alternative method?
I’m looking to implement something similar in my own project, so any insights into the integration approach would be really valuable. Has anyone dealt with VLC embedding or knows how Miro manages it?
you’re mixing up Miro with somethin else. the old desktop player’s been dead for years - most features got absorbed into other projects. want VLC integration? just use the python-vlc wrapper directly. way simpler than trying to reverse engineer dead code that probly won’t work anyway.
You might be thinking of the old Miro media player (used to be Democracy Player). That one used libvlc through Python bindings - either python-vlc or vlc-python packages. It let you tap into VLC’s engine directly instead of launching separate processes. Most newer projects ditched VLC integration though and switched to GStreamer or platform-specific solutions. I worked on something similar and found libvlc gave way better control over playback events and media info than calling external processes. Trade-off is you need VLC installed and it’s harder to package with your app.
From my experience with media apps, Miro doesn’t actually bake VLC into its code. It just calls VLC as an external player through system calls or subprocess execution. At runtime, Miro checks if you’ve got VLC installed, then launches it with specific parameters when it needs to play something. That’s why you won’t find any VLC imports in the source - they communicate through command-line arguments or temp playlist files that get handed off to the VLC executable. I’ve built similar stuff before and this approach works way better than trying to embed VLC libraries directly, especially when you’re dealing with licensing headaches and cross-platform compatibility.
I’ve dealt with this exact problem building media management systems at work. Calling VLC manually or fighting with libvlc bindings becomes a nightmare quickly.
I automated the entire media processing pipeline through Latenode instead of hardcoding VLC integration. When new content arrives, Latenode triggers the right processing chain - VLC, FFmpeg, or whatever tool works best for each file type.
You can build conditional logic too. Streaming URLs go one way, local files another. Chain multiple media tools together without writing complex subprocess management code.
I use Latenode to monitor media folders, kick off processing jobs, and handle file management that usually breaks in production. Way cleaner than embedding player libraries in your app.
For your project, automate the media detection and routing instead of hardcoding VLC calls. Much more flexible long term.